Matt Richtel - The Cloud

“Are you kidding?” Bullseye muttered. “Candlestick is the place the sun don’t shine.”

She laughed. “I always thought that was your wildly hairy butt.”

For years, it became a joke at the bar. Candlestick, frigid and wet, like the city but more so, was the place Where the Sun Don’t Shine. “Shove it Where the Sun Don’t Shine,” someone would mutter and someone would say, “Bullseye’s hairy ass?” and someone else would say, “Candlestick!” Begetting another round.

Groggily, I start the car. In the sky, I discern no residue from the fire. No dark cloud over the area of the juvenile facility.

On my way to the highway, I pass the Youth Guidance Center. In front, five cop cars and two fire trucks. No lights and sirens. It’s inert here. I drive back down O’Shaughnessy, and turn on the radio. I try the various AM stations to hear various iterations of the same brief report about the fire at the Youth Guidance Center. Authorities say it was an unfortunate accident but a small, localized fire that injured no one and did modest property damage. Sandy must have survived.

I enter the highway. Minutes later, I detour through the drive-thru at In-and-Out Burger, order a double-double animal style, fries and a chocolate shake. I inhale them and ten minutes later, exit the highway again just south of San Francisco. Just ahead, on the edge of the bay, looms a football stadium majestic in its setting and outdated in every conceivable way, structurally and in terms of its amenities. But it serves my purpose now in that it’s devoid of humans, lonelier than after a loss to the Cowboys. I pull into one of the gravel overflow parking lots and leave on my fog lights. Five minutes later, Bullseye pulls up in his baby, a meticulously restored 1972 Cadillac with crack-free red leather seats, an impeccable eight-track tape player, and dice hanging from the mirror.

Knowing that Bullseye likes to exert as little energy as possible, I unhook my seat belt and walk to the Caddie. I’m met with an unpleasant surprise. Samantha sits in the passenger seat. Her shoulders are wrapped in a ceremonial Indian scarf. She holds a deck of cards.

Bullseye opens the door a crack and shrugs, a kind of apology; he knows that I can’t deal right now with Samantha’s witchery, or the filial worry that seems to accompany all of the recent attention she’s given me.

“Hi, Witch. No time for tarot.”

“Solitaire.” She smiles warmly. I doubt her words; she wouldn’t be here if she didn’t have some healing plan up her sleeve.

Bullseye steps from the car and pulls the seat forward so I can climb in back. Samantha looks at my scared and charred face, now bathed in the car’s interior light. Her smile disappears. She looks down at her cards. What does a big sister tell a little brother who keeps screwing up?

“Let’s hear it, Bullseye.”

He sits back down and shuts the door, reaches under the front seat and lifts a razor-thin Apple laptop. It’s open, the rectangular screen projecting a grayish green light in the car. He hands it to me, and I settle back with it in the seat. I see a graph.

Along the left are six Chinese characters and so too along the bottom. In the middle of the graph there are words to describe the intersection of the characters. I think I get that this means the interpretation of these symbols depends on the meaning of the individual Chinese characters, which themselves may have different meanings.

“From the Net?”

“Hacker friend from Beijing.” In his tone, an atypical pride.

I look more closely at the possible meanings. At the bottom left of the graph, the meanings are so bizarre as to be worthless. The first reads: “Circle Haircut,” then “Round Hemisphere Clown.” One in the middle reads: “Fast Turtle Balance.” They take only slightly more meaning as the graph moves to the right. The one on the farthest tip means “Brain Balance Drug,” and “Earth God Drug.”

I pause from reading when I sense movement in the car. Samantha steps out of the front seat, pulls it back, climbs next to me. She puts her right hand on my forehead, as if taking my temperature. She holds it there.

“What’s interesting about this, Bullseye?”

“The gestalt-something my friend explained but that I didn’t write down.”

I wait for him to go on, and after a beat, he does. “It’s a potent drug.”

“What is?”

“He said if he had to interpret these characters, aside from what they denote, they seem to symbolize a transformation. Something that changes people.”

“Like a psychedelic?”

“Like something that turns you into God.”

I clear my throat, thinking.

“The hacker told me: picture a giant brain balancing the Earth.”

“Balancing,” I mutter. Then, just a bit more loudly: “Juggling?”

Bullseye shrugs.

I’m feeling warm. I look up. Over the red leather top of the front seat, he extends a yellow Post-it. On it, he’s written a phone number and address in Palo Alto.

“Where you can find the hacker.”

“In Beijing?”

“He’s doing security work in the valley, on an H1-B.” Temporary work visa.

I take the note and notice the letters and numbers he’s written look fuzzy around the edges. I blink hard.

“Why do you encourage him?” Samantha asks her husband.

“I find it entertaining.”

“He’s broken.”

“Chasing things is how he heals himself.”

“Hey. I’m right here.”

I expect Samantha to respond to my protestation with something like, Yeah, but you’re not really here. You’re not all here. You’re not dealing with your life. It’s not just the concussion, and the black eye, the black face, the urgency of investigation, not trusting. It’s the void, she’d say, that black space inside your head, pulsing with orange and red on the outside, not caused by concussion. But something else, or the absence of something else. C’mon, Nat, you know what I mean.

Why did Polly change her phone number?

I look at Samantha, who I notice now has one hand on each side of my head, cradling it upright. Energy work.

“So chase,” she says.

I nearly manage a smile.

“What?” she asks.

“Did you just mind-meld me?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

I wriggle my head to get it out of the Witch’s grasp. “Okay. I’ll chase.”

I know where to start. It’s not at the hacker’s house. I look at Bullseye. “Can I take your Mac?”

He shrugs his ascent. I need it because I need to find the address of my next stop. And I need to set a trap.

Bullseye’s taillights disappear. In my mind’s eye, I see that void again, the black one surrounded by orange-and-red fire that the Witch planted, or exposed, or that I allowed to surface. I blink so that it’ll recede again. Whatever I’m chasing will lead inside that void.

And I think: how melodramatic.

I walk to the Audi, open the trunk, pull out my own laptop. I power it up and sit in the front seat. I open a browser, then realize that, unlike with Bullseye’s computer, mine has no Internet card. That’s relatively easily solved, I hope, by one of the handful of restaurants and homes on the hillside near the ballpark. I drive less than two minutes to a diner, the Niner Diner, and luck into an unsecured Wi-Fi connection called “FIRSTNTEN.” I sit in the lot. A lone night owl sits in the diner.

I log in and I search for “Budget hotel Marin, CA.” I find a link to a site advertising nine hotels under $44. This turns out not to be true but it’s beside the point. This is just a head fake. I click on two of the hotels, choose one, then put its address into Mapquest. Then I ask for directions to the hotel from “my present location.” I get a map. I close the computer.